Farhat Beg from UC San Diego in partnership with Frank Graziani from LLNL will lead the new project. Their proposal focuses on creating a new Center for Frontiers in High Energy Density Science (HEDS) to study the fundamentals of nuclear physics, planetary science, and astrophysics. The field of HEDS examines material properties and physical processes under extreme conditions that exist from the interior of stars to fusion energy. Other contributors are from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, and LANL.

The new multi-campus UC center will integrate with LLNL's HEDS Center with the goal of having students, postdocs, and faculty come to LLNL to use Department of Energy (DOE) facilities and develop technical collaborations.

"The project will enable transformative research and technical development by partnering UC campuses with DOE partners by novel use of DOE facilities, unique research and technical collaborations between UC and DOE scientists, and by deepening connections between theory, experiment, computation and applications," said physicist and LLNL lead investigator Graziani.